


Where do carapacians go when they die?

by MafagafoGirl



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (karkat says fuck), Candy path, Character Study, Explicit Language, Gen, The Homestuck Epilogues, War, carapacians - Freeform, it's basically me having feelings over stabdad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 17:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18554437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MafagafoGirl/pseuds/MafagafoGirl
Summary: Karkat oversees a battle for the freedom of trolls, and start reminiscing about his past.A short character study.





	Where do carapacians go when they die?

Karkat watched the Troll Slums from a balcony, covered in shadows, looking at the battle below, almost at the distance. The resistance using the intricate, poor architecture of the slums in their favor, as barricades and covers, ways to try to stealth around the enemies and corner them, and, looking at the light show the confront brought to him with its laser beams and drone explosions, the commander reminisced.

 

It has been a very arduous battle, and somehow he felt it was still just starting. He did have hopes for success, though. Not very high, but hopes nonetheless. Karkat looked down to the edge of the balcony and ran his eye forwards towards the horizon, as a way to measure the distance between him and the battle; it was a bit hard to measure distance without his second eye. He never thought he’d be so dedicated to a cause he’d trade an eye for it. Meenah thinks he finally looks badass, and not like the crabby manlet he’s always been. When he looks in the mirror, though, Karkat sees something else.

 

He feels mimicking him would make him alive, somehow. He was the first person --well, game construct --that Karkat felt really understood him. At the time, it felt so important; their blood was the same color, so he understood his struggles; now that reasoning is just silly, but still his role in the trolls life, in his own view, was bigger than it seemed, than it should have been.

 

It was just an exile barking orders onto his head, at first, and then he was just there, by his side, consoling him for losing his lusus and stabbing imps left and right. It just felt so comforting. To know that thick-skulled prick shouting at him through a console actually cared enough to cut his hand to make him feel better, telling him to toughen up in that weird way carapacians talk. After losing his guardian, it felt like having something that was kind of like a guardian, but not really, to ease the loss out, and afterwards when Karkat looked back to those times he couldn’t be more glad he was around.

 

In truth, Karkat had a lot of time to consider and ponder about him, when he stopped to reflect in his path up to now. When he finally woke up on Prospit, and found him… No, not him, just John’s Jack, someone he once referred to as “cancer”, he remembered vaguely. It took him a lot of time to understand and process it, that it wasn’t his Jack, and he would never pierce a sword through Karkat’s barely awaken torso.

 

Well, maybe he would. But it would require a very specific context, and he didn’t think it would be just up and simple as find-stab-leave, like that one was. But at the time it was a shock, and made the act of sleeping for Karkat fairly dreaded. He couldn’t think of going back to sleep and relive that moment in his subconscious, or a dream bubble, or wherever.

 

That all sounded so distant now. He’s gone a long way since then. Got rougher around the edges, got an eyeball taken out, got too old for people’s shit. In some ways more than others, he could say his exile brushed off on him quite a lot. But that was something he wanted to keep for himself. He wouldn’t want his soldiers to think their commander was so childish as to mimic a childhood hero. 

 

Somewhat near the balcony, on the ground, a carapace tries to escape the crossfire ahead, and Karkat puts his eyebrows together, continuing on his train of thought. He never saw his corpse. Well, he couldn’t --the planet it was on got half of it blown away --but, in reality, he’s never seen a carapacian corpse on Earth C. Well, now that the war has started, he has, but they were all fresh. He’s never seen a carapacian funeral. A carapacian tombstone. But he knows those little chess people die. He’s seen their generations renew, how every couple of years or so there aren’t the same sort-of-similar faces around, he’s seen the Mayor die, for crying out loud. This wonder about carapacian death is stupid.

 

But… He’s never seen them in dream bubbles. As ghosts, or dreamers, he meant. Whenever they did show up, it was like background NPCs, silent, robotic. To be fair, that’s what they were always meant to be, wasn’t it? Just little chess people to populate the planet, invisible to the players, because they aren’t meant to be relevant. So it’s kinda curious how one of them, multiple times across multiple universes, managed to be so relevant. How one of them managed to be so relevant to Karkat. He wished he knew if there was a carapacian heaven, so he could at least direct his thoughts when he tried to clear them out. He’d give an arm so they could chat again. Think again, speak to him was a better way to describe it. His Jack wasn’t much of a talker, and whenever he did, was in that alien carapacian way that’s kind of silent and completely confusing but somehow very understandable.

 

All these years, and he couldn’t quite wrap his head around the thought that he’d never see that asshole again. Not even if he went to look for a carapacian heaven somewhere, which he pretty much didn’t think exist.

 

After all… Where  _ do _ carapacians go when they die?

**Author's Note:**

> here it is, the first epilogue shitfic (tm) (dont look that up tho)
> 
> feedback is appreciated :D I love comments ^^  
> My tumblr is artiesbutt. Feel free to shout at me any time.


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